U.S. Care Quality is No Better Than Other Countries

What does the United States get for its exceptionally high health spending? The answer from Johns Hopkins researcher Peter S. Hussey is “not much.” In this study, Hussey led a distinguished team in developing a set of 21 indicators to evaluate health system quality in five industrialized nations: Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, and the United States. Although the U.S. spends roughly twice per capita on health care what the other nations do, it received a significantly higher standardized score on only two of the quality measures (breast cancer survival and cervical cancer screening rates).

The U.S. health system does not provide higher quality care despite our high spending. Instead, our resources are diverted into the administrative waste inherent in our private insurance payment system and expensive interventions that are often of dubious value. Only a single-payer system has the potential to reallocate our plentiful health resources to high-quality care for all.